Cloud-based Unified Communication (UC) services can provide unique conferencing and collaboration services to customers such as business enterprises, as well as the distinguishing ability to offer certain communications service providers (CSP) the ability to market, resell, and manage UC services on a set of common infrastructure.
A business enterprise, such as a large corporation, might have multiple telecom service contracts in effect with a UC provider, such as Tata Communications, and also with one or more CSPs for voice services, such as AT&T or Time Warner. Where this is the case, the business enterprise will want its employees to utilize all such telecom resources to the greatest extent possible. In the course of doing business, an employee might use both UC provider resources and CSP provider resources regularly, and teams of employees might use both sets of resources concurrently within each team, such as for conferencing.
Meanwhile, a CSP might want to leverage its own embedded communications infrastructure in adopting, utilizing, and reselling UC services. An implementation in which a CSP leverages its infrastructure atop the common UC infrastructure can be broadly referenced as a Converged Communication Architecture (CCA). In order to provide CCA abilities where end-users can access service from either CSP- or UC-based facilities, a set of robust conference notification and management interfaces are required.
Ideally, conferencing in this manner should be able to take place across multiple locations such as within a company, at home, or somewhere while traveling on a business or personal trip. However, because each computer network that serves each teleconferencing environment, or “domain,” has a particular demarcation and each demarcation limits the network's connectivity with one or more other computer networks of other teleconferencing environments, the networking of endpoints across multiple domains can be problematic.
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved technique for executing and managing inter-domain communication sessions, without at least some of the disadvantages in the prior art.